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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019May 9, 2025 2303

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

George Bernard Shaw

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

Mickey Spillane

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

Don’t annoy an author, you’ll end up in their book and you won’t look good.

Lawrence Wray

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.

Michael Crichton

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Clarence Budington Kelland

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

Ever heard of a carpenter not going to work because he has “carpenter’s block”? If a writer can’t write, it’s because he doesn’t really want to, he isn’t ready to get it on paper or he’s just plain lazy.

Chet Cunningham

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.